 | | | Subject: Easy to use and read
Posted Aug 7, 2002 by The Researcher formally known as Dr St Justin
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 | | The best websites are easy to use - the menus/navigation bars are laid out in an easy-to-read manner, and the site is split into intuitive sections - if you know what you're looking for, you know where it should be.
Ideally, it shouldn't be too heavy on graphics. Yes, if they're done well they look good, but think about download times for the users. Quite often people know where they want to go on the site, but can't remember (or don't know) the address for that page, so go to the front page and click the right link(s). Assume a person has to click three links to get to the page they want - if all the links are graphics, that could mean having to wait for three sets of graphics to load up, in order to be sure of getting to the right place. Over a 56k modem, that could be quite a wait. Even over ADSL it can get frustrating!
Individual pages should contain no more than 1.5 - 2 screen lengths of information. This size goes some way to ensuring that each page is of a readable length.
Avoid big blocks of text. They're plain ugly. If I wanted to read that sort of thing, I'd pick up a book. Break up the text blocks - even just putting paragraphs in makes a huge difference! One or two (small) graphics make it a bit easier on the eye, as do different (larger) font sizes for things like headers.
Netscape's <BLINK> can be quite fun. But it tends to get very annoying if it's overused... as does IE's <MARQUEE>.
There are JavaScript bits that change the colour of the text continuously. These are also annoying! They force the eye (and brain) to continually adjust to different wavelengths - more work than your vision system should have to cope with!
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| | | Subject: Easy to use and read
Posted Aug 8, 2002 by Excelsior
This is a reply to this Posting
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 | | Interesting that you say web pages should be relatively "short" - in screen height terms. I would imagine that most of the articles on h2g2 would break that rule. I know what you mean, though, as there are a few pages on my own site that I think could do with breaking up. The only downside is that that means more pages to maintain and more pages for people to find - and more to try and cram into your navigation design.
One compromise which I use is internal links on the page appearing after each section. So for example, if I'm doing an episode guide, you can jump to any other episode once you've finished reading one - but some are actually on the same page. One thing I would certainly try and avoid is using the full width of a screen for long pieces of text; on modern monitors it really forces you to "pan and scan". Columns are easier...
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